BAMMM! My sinuses!

I feel like an automaton with a virus. The bugs (of the software variety, and not of the type that are currently pwning my immune system) just do not. stop. coming. That's what comes from working on a game with a hojillion expansion packs. You know that thing from the third expansion pack? Well it breaks your feature. You know that menu you added in the fourth expansion pack? Well, if you run your feature with that special option from expansion pack five, that menu doesn't show up. Gaaahhhh! It's like I fix twelve and get thirteen more! I'm bailing this canoe as fast as I can, eleven to twelve hours a day (and have been for at least two weeks now), and I can't WAIT until we get this thing out of the door and hopefully out of my hair.
To top it off, I now have the plague. Can't take the day off, because the bugs would pile up too high.
So here I am, snotty and irate.
On a happier topic, here's my list of most epic awesome songs EVAR.
(This has been at least two years in the making. Most of these songs just hit the event horizon of stupid and slingshot off into the dimension of WIN)
-My Console - Eiffel 65
A song about how much this guy likes to play video games. In all seriousness. "We're going to play the game! The playstation! All DAY!" Vid brought to you by some kids who need more homework.
-Future Fail - Frontline Assembly
Now here's a song for pwning newbs. Probably the pinnacle of Bill Leeb's career. Close second: Columbian Necktie by Frontline Assembly. Sadly I couldn't find a vid of this one. There's a short clip of it while some guy is playing WoW. This song was MADE for WoW.
-Birthday Cake - Cibo Matto
About a crazy Japanese mother making a birthday cake for her son and his wife.
-Gheib Anni Gheib - Nawal El Zoghby
Disco hits Lebanon. The album cover has the usual sultry looking middle eastern woman wearing clothing that would be haram in the street, but Nawal's wearing a COWBOY HAT, too. The video is for a different song by her.
- Cream and Bastards Rise - Harvey Danger
I used to think this was a song about my job. Apparently I was wrong. Or maybe I've just become a bastard.
-Tragedy for You - Front 242
A sweet love song from half the genius that brought you "Future Fail."
- Existence - Project Pitchfork.
Ah. One of my favourite purveyors of disgruntlement. Listen to the lyrics. This song is extremely touching and poignant, or at least it would be if the vocal processing didn't make the singer sound like a bulimic vulture. Also check out Renascence, my favourite soundtrack to being pissed off.
-Stick it Out - Frank Zappa
Best song ever about having sex with a robot. The source of every bit of German that I know....that is, the bits that didn't come from Rammstein.
- Doctorin' the Tardis - Timelords/KLF
Nope. Haven't decided whether this song embarrasses the hell out of me or is just guilty fun. Rides the same short-bus as "My Console", but sits closer to the front so the driver can keep an eye on it. Actually was the subject of a book by the authors on how you can make a #1 hit with no talent.

Evremonde and Advent Children: Fanservice for Two

There's something alluring about fanfiction...since the birth of the novel, people have been unsatisfied with the ends afforded their favourite characters, writing them new endings, and putting them in new situations altogether. It's been a week flavoured with fanservice for me. I read the 600 page epic Evremonde--a "sequel" to Tale of Two Cities, and got to see Final Fantasy Advent Children. Because they have like nothing to do with eachother other than that both are complete fanservice (only really appealing to people who were rabid fans of the original) and because I once told someone that I could compare anything to Tale of Two Cities (he dared me to compare TOTC to Woody Allen's What's Up Pussycat. I hope this is close enough!) I'm going to review Evremonde and Advent Children *TOGETHER*. Here we go!
As an adolescent, I spent a really embarrassing amount of time composing epilogues to Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities in my head. The picture taped to the inside of my locker in 7th grade was a self-drawn fanart of Sydney Carton. In retrospect, I think this was my teen angst, which didn't get expressed in rebelliousness (or pyromania).
Naturally, I was really psyched when I accidentally found a book called "Evremonde" on Amazon. The book is a continuation of Tale of Two Cities, which takes place after Charles and Lucy escape the French Revolution at the expense of Sydney Carton's life. They have a son whose name is Sydney, after their late friend, and a second daughter, who becomes part of their family as a condition to their escape from the port of Le Sable. The book deals with the fear of discovery which plagues the family as it becomes apparent that individual grudges against the Evremonde family have outlived the Revolution (and Mme Defarge, who is curiously absent from this tale.)
Similarly, Advent Children deals with the trials which face the characters of Final Fantasy VII after the destruction of the city of Midgar. Tifa has returned to her erstwhile occupation as a barmaid at the 7th Heaven bar, but she has taken Barrett's Daughter Marylena under her wing. Cloud is now a mercenary, terrorized with guilt over the death of the enchantress Aerith. A gang of strangely familiar looking silver haired men has risen to power and threatens to resurrect someone who bears a really, really nasty grudge against Cloud...(and you know who THAT is).
Advent Children has some plotting and characterization issues. You get the feeling that if the Silver-Haired gangsters weren't the living incarnations of Jenova, they'd be hanging out at Hot Topic. They're really just a bunch of whinny momma's boys. And as far as the development of other characters goes, there really isn't any, so I'm not going to dwell on it. You get to see all your favourite characters and some of your not so favourite ones. In HIGH RESOLUTION!!! That's good enough for me! The plot itself was...er....NOT epic. There were a lot of intriguing and important plotlines that just kind of petered out, making the villains pretty much look stupid and ineffective. Why are the heroes even bothering?
Unlike Advent Children, Evremonde is excellently plotted. It is all beleivable and the characters are very good extrapolations of the characters in Dickens. Lucie Manette is still the demure golden thread, holding her family together, but she has developed through her hardships. I must give Ms. Mayer credit here. Lucie is far more interesting in Evremonde than she ever was in Tale of Two Cities. She's compassionate, but made tough through her trials. In Evremonde, it's Lucie, not Charles who wears the pants. It's Lucie who has the strength to patch the family back together after the Revolution.
Come to think of it, Charles didn't wear the pants in the original, either. He's still the well-intentioned dumbass that he was in Dickens. His relationship with Lucie, and the wedge that Carton has driven into their marriage is dealt with masterfully. I would have liked to see more development of the new characters in Evremonde. Sydney has been well developed, but at times, his actions appear too extreme for the personality which has been created for him. The love interest of the novel, Little Lucy's suitor, Manfred, is sadly pretty flat. You don't get a lot of sympathy for his character, which is too bad.
It's obvious that the author, Diana Mayer is a good writer. Where she gets bogged down is in trying to emulate Dickens' prose. Pages are spent describing an event which would have taken minutes, and while some of the philosophical musings are reminiscent in tone to the beautiful musings which make the original a classic, they tend to be too obvious and trite. Evremonde is self published through iUniverse, and would be made 100 times better through editing. The book would be far more powerful if Ms. Mayer could write in her own style instead of trying and failing to imitate Dickens.
One of the criticisms that I heard about Advent Children was that the action scenes obliterated any consistent narration of the plot. It's true that the action is sometimes sickeningly fast-paced, but it's fairly easy to follow provided that you keep the following in mind: coloured hair == good. Silver hair == bad. Physics == irrelevant and coloured hair+silver hair == beatdown. As fun as the beatdown is to watch, it's not a great substitute for, as I mentioned above, neatly tying off loose ends. I can't help but think Square has grossly underestimated the attention span and intelligence of the audience for this movie. We did, afterall, wait for about 7 years between the movie and the game. I want to see a little more than hot androgynous guys in tight outfits beating the snot out of eachother with crazy transformable sword-gun-chucks.
Although, Damn! Those guys were HOTTT! Especially with giant swords....
Evremonde is at its very best when it deals with each family member's grief over the death of Sydney Carton, and mixture of reverence and revulsion, guilt and thankfulness for his suicide. The scenes dealing with this subject are raw and delicate. The parts of the plotline wherein Sydney must come to grips with his unique past and his nationality are beautifully executed.
In short, Evremonde is a diamond in the rough. The characters are well fleshed out, and the narrative has moments of brilliance. I really hope that Ms. Mayer eventually finds an editor and gets this book republished. It would definitely be worth it. Hell, I've even pondered offering to help edit it even though I'm always crazy busy. If you loved Tale of Two Cities, you must read it anyway!
Advent Children is pure eyecandy. The movie's plot isn't the epic that you want it to be -- that the game was. But the really awesome animation and the pretty-boy beatdown make the movie incredibly entertaining. Especially the final battle, wherein you giant-sword fight your arch-nemesis with a metal cover of the Jenova theme blaring in the background as you fall through the sky amidst flying debris. It *RAWKS*.

And, lest you think Evremonde was totally devoid of similar asskicking, I leave you with this quote from Evremonde. [SPOILER] Sydney, battling towards Paris at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars confronts a French military messenger who has caused about 400 pages of chaos in the life of his family. The messenger begs for his life:
"He [the messenger] therefore watched the same [Sydney] raise his rifle--having been asked by him, since he had such strong opinions on the matter of what Frenchmen might or might not do to one another, whether he had any further opinions on what the son of a Shrewsbury drunk and a London whore, as well might or might not do to a Frenchman--and when he came to no answer, whether from his astonishment or his inability to understand the question, he was shot once through the head and fell dead beside the wounded prisoner."
YEAH! EAT IT! EAT IT, BATCH!

The 360. A Summary of My Thrills and Rage

I was starting to think that the XBox 360 might not suck so much as a platform after being really disappointed in the backwards compatibility initially. I didn't own an original Xbox. There were a lot of games on it that I would have liked to have played, and I was really counting on those being playable on the new hardware. Log onto the Microsoft forums, and you'll see millions of flaming threads (with some notes from yours truly on some) asking, begging, groveling, flaming for games that were popular on the original system to be made backwards compatible.
I have nothing against the guys on the backwards compatibility team at Microsoft. I think they got a herculean task and probably about a fourth as many people as would be sanely required to do it (like that ever happens in the game industry :P).
I'm also sure that backwards compatibility was something casually spouted off by marketing that has now become a 2 year living hell for these guys, but their responses to user posts range from the thin-skinned to the accusing, all laced with a generous helping of pomposity.
Back to this later. I plugged it into the HD jack on my behemoth of a TV, and damned if it wasn't crystal clear. Oooh, neat! I thought. I'm going to play some games. This is going to be HOTTTT. But first, I'm going to stream some music and video! I have the network cable strung across the middle of the living room floor ....why not? (because adding wireless capability to the 360 would cost me $100. Let's chalk that one down as another victory for Nintendo.)
I have this neat program for the macintosh that allows me to connect to the 360 and stream video and music. It worked surprisingly well for all movies not bought at the itunes store, and I'm sure even those can be "taken care of". No need for me to buy an Apple TV!
Satisfied by my movie experience, I decided that I needed to give backwards compat another chance, and I popped in Munch's Oddysee, which I've been wanting to play for ages. Everything worked fine until the intro was over.....and then the controller became unresponsive. The Backwards Compatibility team STRIKES AGAIN. I tried again. Still can't move abe around on the screen.
Maybe I'm badly informed, but how hard can it be to test if something works when everyone who owns one of these systems has the SAME DAMN HARDWARE?!
You can assume that if a game works on one playstation, it probably works on all playstations unless the system is borked. Or that you can run a dos game under windows xp using the same tweaking with two identical PCs.
So in short, the 360 is shaping up to be a decent media machine. The video streaming is great. There *still* are only a handful of games which aren't squarely aimed at the 15 year old horomonal trigger-happy boy set (or the boys who are 30 going on 15), which is why us non-teenage-boys still have to put a little stock in backwards compatibility. I'm excited about Tenchu Z and Guitar Hero 2, both of which I own. Oblivion's a lot better on a PC. Viva Pinata sucks rocks. You can take that from a person who works on games like that and is therefore in the know.
The games I have which are supposedly backwards compatible don't work, and most of the ones I really want to play aren't backwards compatible. I shudder to think of sony ditching BC to cut prices and moving to software emulation. (They already have in europe).
Because however incompetent Microsoft is, Sony's an order of magnitude less so.

Too Many Friggin' Bugs

Today was stressful.
I felt like I was playing whack-a-mole with my bug count all day...or that I was the little boy with his finger in the dike. I'd fix one, get two more. Fix two, get four more. All of them were things which were pretty lame, but which someone is going to find and whinge about if I don't fix them. I can't wait until I get it down to a manageable number so I can get some well-earned slacking in. I've written a poem on what it's like to be in the game industry and be on a 6 month dev cycle.
crunch.
crunch.
crunchcrunchcrunch.
crunch.
sit-on-butt-and-do-nothing.
cruunch.
get a bug.
PANIC.
crunch.crunch.
slack.
That being said so artfully, I love working in games. I really can't think of anything I'd rather be doing...except for maybe "not fixing bugs."
Anyway, I was going to transfer my stuff over to livejournal, but I started picking a layout for my journal, realized that you had to pay for all the neat ones, then realized that you get advertisements if you choose the "plus" account option to get the slightly less crappy layouts, and that you only get a limited amt of picture uploads. Screw that, I thought. I'm cozy on blogger. I have, however, added links to more of my livejournal friends' journals. I was going to hit random a whole bunch of times on blogger and then post the more interesting things I found, but then I discovered that the journals on blogger break down into the following:

The 7th Guest, Powerpoint Limbo, and How I Became a Game Programmer

bI was just reading Glenn's Blog wherein he mentioned that he started programming in C when he was still in swaddling clothes. (Ok. So Maybe I am exaggerating a bit...but not much.) It made me reflect on how I had gotten it into my head in junior high that I wanted to be a game programmer. I could not program in swaddling clothes...in fact, until I was a junior in highschool, I didn't even know anyone who *could* program. Well, there was that guy down the road when I was in highschool, but I had a crush on him and I sure as hell wasn't going to go over there, knock on his door and ask him to teach me assembly...that might betray my raging hormones!
I was, however, interested in computers from a young age. I was interested in computers as a means to an end--and that end was games. My parents were of the correct conviction that Nintendo rotted a child's brains, so I made friends who had consoles and C64s. I begged my mother to let me stay after school to play the ascii driving game called, creatively, "Driver" on the Apple ][ machines at my primary school. I got very good at pretending I was controlling the actions of characters in the arcade games at the local Taco Time without actually inserting quarters into the machine.
When I was in 4th grade, my parents purchased a brand new, shiny, atom smashing Gateway 2000 486/66 with 8 megs of RAM and a SoundBlaster sound card. They also bought my sister and I a copy of Sim City 2000, which I never got very good at. Now I know people who worked on SC2000. And it's kind of creepy.
Around that time, I first played the 7th Guest at a friend's house. In stunning 3D, it was the coolest game I'd ever seen. My friend and I worked on the massive maze in the dungeon of Stauf's mansion and at every dead end, we'd look at eachother, giggle, and recite, along with the computer: "Feeling....Loooonely?" When I finally scrounged up enough birthday money to buy my own copy of The 7th Guest, I was dismayed to discover that it wouldn't run on my family's 486! It was the first time I'd ever had to troubleshoot the computer. (The soundcard settings were incorrect. I still remember that the IRQ channel for the later first gen Soundblasters is 5 and not 7 like it says in the manual.) I became fascinated with troubleshooting and started reading any literature on DOS that I could get my hands on. Which wasn't much.
Programming was completely alien to me at this point. I thought that writing batch files was equivalent to coding, and I was totally baffled by the fact that when you opened an .exe file in notepad, it was gibberish. I didn't even know that you needed a compiler, nevermind what one was.
The offerings for programming at my highschool were non-existent. The highest level computer class was basic HTML, and there were only four other people knowledgeable enough to take that class. My highschool had a lamentable lack of other geeks. The other marginally interesting sounding computer class was "Computer Media", which was really "How to use powerpoint". All computer classes were presided over by two incompetent vultures. Of this Clarice and Cora of the Computer Lab, I won't say much, except that I had no basic understanding upon which to learn how to program. Someone was going to have to teach me, but it certainly wasn't going to be these two.
At this time, I had developed a sort of hero worship for Graeme Devine, who was the head programmer on...you guessed it...the 7th Guest, and the 11th Hour. I'd found and xeroxed an article he'd written for Wired Magazine about developing the 11th Hour and the benefits of Object Oriented programming. I looked OOP on the internet. The first site I'd found talked about a black box and something called "encapsulation". WTF is THAT?
I thought, "I want to program games like Graeme Devine!"
At my second Highschool, I started learning how to code in Visual Basic. I wrote some rudimentary programs of the type that highschool kids write. I can't remember any of them. Faced with code and deadlines for the first time, I made a resolution that there was no way in hell I was going to do this as a career. So I applied to college as a major in biology.
Except that my resolution to stay away from code fell through...
Freshman year in college, a friend came to me and said "Hey, you want to take Object Oriented Programming with me? We get to write Tetris!" I said yes for three reasons: a) I finally got to learn what OOP was. b) TETRIS and c) misery loves company.
It wasn't miserable though. It was more rewarding than any of my biology classes.
OOP became Assembly.
Assembly became GPU coding.
C++ happened on and off, in patches throughout.
...and next thing I know, I'm working as a coder for the artist formerly known as Maxis!

The Top 10...Home Stretch!

I just spend fifteen minutes playing a game which actually *credited* Bryce 3D as the tool used to create the graphics. That's "Kwality" there. I guess I can give the game a little break because the game was dev'ed by one person...but COME ON. BRYCE?!! And he used the Bryce default materials, too. Dude. I know you're a n00b, but could we have a little effort, please? Might play it again and see if the puzzles are actually fun. But it's certainly not going to be on the list of
TOP FIVE GAMES THAT DON'T SUCK!
5) The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)
There are many reasons I flunked second semester organic chemistry, but Morrowind is my favourite. RPGs will never be the same for me. I lament the lack of unchecked ganking inWoW. The lack of moving clouds and water in just about every other game. Morrowind has not aged terribly well, it's true. The character models are pretty bad, and the textures are fugly. But the gameplay is still loads of fun. The mythos surrounding the world of Morrowind is lovingly developed through the books in every house which you can read, and each locale in the game has its own culture and flavour. It's a totally free play fantasy game where you are on a quest to uncover some prophecy or messiah or something, but screw that, you can wander around the world, and rob tombs and free slaves, and collect neat swords, and gank any NPC who looks at you funny. And you can take their awesome loot, too! And you can comandeer their houses! This is a game about stealing and killing, and it does stealing and killing better than just about any game out there.
4) Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (2002)
This is the most breathtakingly beautiful and atmospheric game I've ever played. Unlike Morrowind, it has aged extremely well, mostly due to the high res textures. It is the only Myst game built on a 3D FPS engine. (I think it was the original Half Life engine, but I'm not sure) and the series benefits immensely from it. The puzzles are diabolically hard, especially in one world, where all of the puzzles are number games, and the story is a trifle melodramatic at times, but this game is amazingly absorbing, and the addition of unique puzzles involving movement and jumping make it even more so. And the water and skies move. Ooooh. It handles the Myst mythos far more consistently and delicately than any of the outsourced Myst games do, (Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation) creating and experience of sheer wonder uninterrupted by incredulity.
3)Vagrant Story (2000)
I like this game because the main character wears assless chaps.
2) ...
Vagrant Story was the first RPG where I felt a real attachment to the characters. I wanted to know what happened to Sydney and Ashley, and I really wanted to smack down the SOB who was the main villain. It has a fighting system which I found very innovative and intuitive. Unlike the Final Fantasy games, Vagrant Story allows free movement of the character during a fight, pausing to let you select your moves. From this evolved the fight system in Final Fantasy XII. The game has plenty of replay value with areas hidden behind locked doors only openable when you obtain the key. Once you beat the game, you can go back and replay the game with a new set of bosses and new weapons to develop. The weapon development system is fun as well. You build your own weapons by combining parts of weapons you find and jewels which confer upon the weapons special powers. As you play, you will discover that your weapons become acclimated to certain enemy types, so you will have to develop your weapons to play to their strengths. Vagrant Story is a complicated, detailed, absorbing game, which will engage you like no other hack 'n slash RPG.
2) Obsidian (1997)
This won Games Magazine's Game of the Year in 1997, and there's a good reason why. Obsidian plays like Myst or 7th Guest with the user exploring a surrealistic world, and solving puzzles. Unlike those games, though, the puzzles in Obsidian fit perfectly into the premise of the game: You are an engineer named Lilah who has pursued her partner Max into a mysterious monolith growing near their mountain campsite. Lilah and Max have developed a satellite which repairs the Earth's atmosphere molecule by molecule via nanotechnology. Lilah's brilliant AI programming makes the satellite autonomous, but what happens when a machine that is written to reprogram itself actually develops consciousness? Religion? Curiosity about the subconscious of its creators in an effort to develop its own? The worlds in which the game takes place are Lilah and Max's dreams, created molecule by molecule by The Conductor: the "self" of Ceres the satellite. The first world is a beaurocracy built on the inside of a cube in which the gravity is constantly changing, allowing the player to walk on the walls.
The only complaint I have about Obsidian is that it's too short. I'd happily play a masterwork like Obsidian for much, much longer.
1) The 7th Guest (1993)
This game gets dumped on a lot. It was a showcase for people with their snazzy new CD drives. It's a badly acted FMV game with a hammy plot. It's linear. The puzzles aren't really integrated into the game play. Blah blah blah.
This game still amuses the hell out of me, just as it did when I first played it at a friend's house in 6th grade. The 7th Guest takes place in the haunted mansion of an evil toymaker, Henry Stauf. Stauf made a deal with demonic forces which enabled him to make toys highly coveted by children...toys which eventually cost them their lives as a mysterious virus scourged the village where Stauf had set up shop. Long after Stauf had retired as a toymaker, he invited six guests to a dinner party at his mansion; a party which Stauf himself did not attend. He instead left his guests a note with a promise of supernatural rewards to the man or woman who can solve the puzzles with which he has littered the house. As each puzzle is solved, a new room opens in the house until the player reaches the attic and learns about Stauf's evil designs on the mysterious 7th Guest.
One of the things I love about the 7th guest is the sense of reward it gives the player as they solve the puzzles. A new room is unlocked. A video plays, revealing more of the personalities of the houseguests. Spooky animations are unlocked. For a game built to run on a 386, the graphics in the 7th guest are still beautifully rendered. You have to scrutinize the screen to realize you are looking at a 256 colour picture. There is no graininess in sight. The soundtrack is also top notch, having some of the most memorable video game tunes I've encountered. The puzzles are not too easy and not too hard. I was able to play all the way through the game feeling challenged but not stumped, which is a great acheivement for a game of this genre.
Lastly, Stauf taunts you as you try and fail to solve his puzzles. Some of his one-liners are hilarious. I got to the point where I was yelling right back at him.
The 7th Guest isn't for everyone. Definitely not for people looking for non-linear gameplay and things to shoot. Or for people who can't enjoy a good bad horror story. But it's a great game for what it is, and executed brilliantly well in just about every area from gameplay to music.

Gentlemen....BEHOLD!

And now, folks, it's time for me to list out the top ten so that I can get to bitching about games I hate. I'm sure you'll find this enlightening.
10) American McGee's Alice
When I applied to EA for a job, this was the only game I'd played that EA had made. Actually, EA published it. Rogue Games dev'ed it. Not sure if they even exist anymore. It seems like the companies that make my faves are short lived. Anyway, it's a 3rd person adventure where you control a goth Alice in Wonderland as she tries to reclaim her sanity in an insane (in a bad way) Wonderland. What really shines about Alice is the level design which is both innovative and fun. One level takes place in a hall of mirrors where murderous automata lurk behind the reflective walls.. One takes place in the mechanism of a clock. This game still stands as one of the best 3rd person hack 'n slash/platformers out there, along with Psychonauts, which seems to have been influenced by Alice from the similarities in tone and gameplay.
9) Bad Mojo
Is a 3rd Person point and click adventure where you get to play....wait for it......a bastard of a guy who has been turned into a cockroach! Your goal is to use your tiny size to discover the story of your own past and to perhaps redeem yourself. It's a very odd twist on the concept of Beauty and the Beast, and an excellent game. The "gross" factor is a big part of the appeal here as you crawl accross the face of a sleeping man, accross a TV dinner, and inside a radio. You solve puzzles by pushing things into place and by finding clues. You also have to avoid being eaten by the cat. Bad Mojo was re-released in more than the original glorious 256 colours just a few years ago, so unlike a lot of old games, this one shouldn't be hard to find.
8)Pharaoh
Is a traditional city building game like Rome or Civ, or more remotely, Sim City. Except you get to build pyramids. And set up trade with other ancient countries. And defend your city. And did I mention that everything is very Egyptian? YEAH! Also, as a note, in this game, it took me about eight generations to build a pyramid with constant building. The real pyramids took about 20 years and (something that the game gets right) were built by conscript labour, not by slaves.
7) The 11th Hour: The Sequel to The 7th Guest (1996)
If you look up this game on any review site, you'll see that it averaged around 6/10 or 5/10. Yeah. The release date of this game was pushed back, and then pushed back again, and by the time it finally came out FMV adventure games were about as cool as the Spice Girls are today, and "linear" gameplay had become a bad word. (At that time, multiple endings were the "Big Thing"). This game was exactly what this fan of the original wanted: pure bad horror cheese for a plot, puzzles that are wicked hard, quotable one-liners, and hottt graphics.* You play a sleazebag reporter searching for his skanky producer Robin Morales who has disappeared into a certain evil toymaker's haunted mansion and is perfectly willing to cut a deal with the devil to advance her own career. Naturally, you follow her into the mansion, and Stauf the Toymaker requires that you humour him by playing his games before he reveals what happened to Robin. This is pretty much the Ninja Gaiden of hard puzzle games with one puzzle requiring about fifty correct moves to solve.
*Hott graphics in this case means that this was one of the first games to have more than 256 colours. The programmer, Graeme Devine, also had to write his own video player/format do display the unusually high-resolution movie sequences in the game. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be like Graeme Devine when I grew up.
6) Zork Nemesis
I originally bought Zork Nemesis because one of my friends in high school told me "I had to play this game". She had a schoolgirl crush on Lucien (one of the characters in the game). I replayed it recently with a more critical eye and was really surprised when, despite the multitude of invisible walls and the aged graphics, it held up to my nostalgic memories. Zork Nemesis is like a movie where it's obvious that all the sets are obviously painted. It looks fake. It looks cheesy but also artsy. And somehow, it just works. The designers tried to build a serious drama on top of a game mythos that is known for its silly, non-sequiter filled humour. It feels cobbled together, but this sense of conflict is one of the things that makes this game really memorable. In a way, the oddly placed humour sets the darker, more macabre aspects of the plot in releif and punctuates them. The story of two young lovers used by their elders and willing to sacrifice themselves for each other becomes more sinister with the addition of the occasional silly reference to the previous games. This game has the most absorbing world and story of any game I've played with the possible exception of Vagrant Story. And that hasn't really diminished with its graphics and gameplay limitations.

I realize this is getting long, which is why I'm going to save the home stretch for later this week. As I look over this list, I realize that the games I've loved have sometimes had what modern designers would consider serious flaws, and that these flaws have served to make the games more absorbing and enjoyable. I think this might be a pretty big contrast between my list and others where the games are actually good. :D

Forty Games that Didn't Suck

Well, there seems to be a bit of a fad to make a list of your favourite games. Albinogrimby has done it. Ohmi has done it. It's my turn now. I'll list the bottom thirty and then give more details on the top ten tomorrow. Likely there will be things on my list that aren't on Ohmi's or Albino's. That's because I'm cooler than they are.
And also a point/click adventure geek.

40 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
39 Zork Grand Inquisitor
38 Resident Evil
37 Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven
36 Myst
35 Kingdom Hearts
34 Katamari Damacy
33 Summoner 2
32 Pokemon Gold/Silver
31 King's Quest 6
30 3d Lemmings*
29 Eternal Daughter *
28 Alone in the Dark
27 Myst Exile
26 Super Mario World
25 Guitar Hero
24 Cosmology of Kyoto *
23 Return to Zork
22 Timelapse
21 The Sims 2 Open for Business
20 Final Fantasy XII
19 Lemmings
18 Clandestiny*
17 Donkey Kong Country
16 Oblivion
15 Final Fantasy Tactics
14 Yoshi's Island
13 Riven
12 Psychonauts
11 Final Fantasy VII
Ooooh. Bet you can't wait to find out what the last 10 are!
I'll admit, I displaced final fantasy VII off the top ten because everyone and their dog knows about it. I offed it in favour of something less popular but just as good.
Also, the games that are starred can be found at home of the underdogs for download, except Clandestiny, which just has a blurb.

It’s Like Sumo Wrestling...With Clumsy Stupid People

Went over to a friend’s place today with the intention of doing some “research” using an indie game we’d picked up for cheap at a local bookstore. The game turned out to be worth the 9 bucks we’d paid for it--and not much more. This particular friend happens to be a procedurally generated graphics and physics geek, and so we ended up looking at some of his favourite freeware games. One riotous selection was Sumotori, a game where the objective is to knock the other player out of the ring sumo-style. Except that since the animations are all procedurally generated, in large part based on the surrounding objects, the wrestlers lose their balance, and trip over each other and every other surface and edge in the game.The result is one part sumo, five parts Three Stooges. The little block men fall in compromising and awkward positions, and struggle to get up, only to trip over another object while stepping backwards. There’s even a hidden level where you can just throw things at the characters and see how they respond. Good sadistic fun for the whole family.

Sorry, Mac People. This one’s only for PC. I’ll find you some games later.